Using Model - Pre WWI

About Uncle Sam

James Montgomery Flagg (my Grandfather) created the original Uncle Sam "I Want You". Although most researches will refer to JMF as the model of his original Uncle Sam, nothing could be farther from the truth. My Mother tried her adult life to correct this error, and I will carry on this monumental task.

In 1916, JMF reluctantly accepted a 4th of July project by Leslie Magazine, and eventually found his Uncle Sam one rainy night on a train bound for Parris Island, where he was to unveil a portrait of the Commandant.

His "symbol of our country" was a young, roughly 17 year old, Marine, which he considered the finest branch of our armed forces. He was able to acquire a 24 hour pass for this "boot" not normally allowed off base, and he aged his model's adolescent face by forty years and turned a circus clown's costume into symbolic dignity (as told to me and written by his daughter, my mother, Faith).

This cover was eventually made into a recruiting poster, at the request of the State Dept, and is now recognized as the most famous war poster of our time.

By WWII, JMF had ironically begun to look remarkably like his original Uncle Sam, and he did indeed use his mirror image in several new posters. When FDR is quoted as saying "saving model hire" in a personal letter to JMF, he is referring to the 2nd World War posters.

Faith would say, "I thought you might find the facts more fun than the fantasies."

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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

That was an old typing practice sentence that I remember well, and is very apropos today. In light of this week's close call regarding upholding our 2nd Amendment rights, keeping the Supreme Court clean of judicial activists could not be more crital.

The ever lovely and brilliant Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum has written an excellent dissertation on the reasons why Elena Kagan is not fit to wear the robes of a Supreme Court justice from the great Townhall.com.

It is so important to voice your opinion to the Senators about to make an all important decision about her. Here are their numbers on page 1, page 2, and page 3.

Barack Obama revealed his goal for the Supreme Court when he complained on Chicago radio station WBEZ-FM in 2001 that the Earl Warren Court wasn't "radical" enough because "it didn't break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution" in order to allow "redistribution of wealth." Now that Obama is president, he has the power to nominate Supreme Court justices who will "break free" from the Constitution and join him in "fundamentally transforming" America.

That's the essence of his choice of Elena Kagan as his second Supreme Court nominee. She never was a judge, and her paper trail is short. But it's long enough to prove that she is a clear and present danger to the Constitution.

When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she presented a guest speaker who is known as the most activist judge in the world: Judge Aharon Barak, formerly president of the Israeli Supreme Court. The polar opposite of the U.S. Constitution, which states that "all legislative powers" are vested in the elected legislative body, Barak has written that a judge should "make" and "create" law, assume "a role in the legislative process," and give statutes "new meaning that suits new social needs."

Barak wrote that a judge "is subject to no authority" except himself, and he "must sometimes depart the confines of his legal system and channel into it fundamental values not yet found in it." Channel? Does he mean he channels in a trance, as Hillary Clinton supposedly channeled discourse with the long deceased Eleanor Roosevelt?

Despite Barak's weirdo writings, or maybe because of them, Kagan called him her "judicial hero." Judge Robert Bork, a man careful with his words, says that Kagan's praise of Barak is "disqualifying in and of itself."

Bork said that Barak "establishes a world record for judicial hubris." Bork wrote that Barak embraces a judicial philosophy that "there is no area of Israeli life that the court may not govern."

During Kagan's confirmation hearing for solicitor general, Sen. Arlen Specter asked her views on using foreign or international law or decisions to interpret our Constitution and laws. She wrote in reply that she approves using "reasonable foreign law arguments."

Au contraire. The U.S. Constitution states that our judges "shall be bound" by "the Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof."

Federal law requires all educational institutions receiving federal funds to present an educational program on the U.S. Constitution on every Constitution Day, September 17. Kagan thumbed her nose at Constitution Day 2007 by hiring a transnationalist to the Harvard faculty, Noah Feldman, and featuring him for two days of speeches.

Transnationalists are lawyers who advocate integrating foreign and international law into the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and laws. In his Harvard Constitution Day address, Feldman urged the "use of international legal materials in constitutional decision-making ... to help actually decide cases," and opined that "international tribunals' rulings must be treated as law."

Kagan's hero is also a transnationalist. In his book "The Judge in a Democracy," he sharply criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court for failing to cite foreign law, and he praises Canada, Australia and Germany for their "enlightened democratic legal systems."

Kagan is particularly inappropriate because this anti-military woman would replace the only veteran on the court, John Paul Stevens. As Harvard Law School dean, Kagan signed a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn or rewrite the Solomon Amendment, which she called "profoundly wrong."

That popular federal law denies federal funds to colleges that bar military recruiters from the campus. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected Kagan's argument, which proves what an extremist she is.

Kagan demonstrated her feminist extremism when she served as the lead White House strategist advising President Bill Clinton to veto the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Ten years later, substantially the same act was passed by Congress, signed by President George W. Bush and upheld by the Supreme Court.

Feldman has just published a long New York Times magazine article in which he worries about how the Supreme Court will rule on lawsuits over Obamacare, Obama's takeover of big corporations and the cronyism in stimulus spending. Feldman hopes the Kagan appointment means that "the moment has arrived for progressive constitutional thought" to take over the courts.

The left is counting on Kagan to play a major role in getting the Supreme Court to uphold Obama's transformation of our exceptional private enterprise system to a socialist economy. The New Republic magazine is salivating at the prospect that Kagan will reassert the discredited doctrine of the "living Constitution."

Monday, June 28, 2010

And so, each election Tuesday will be one bumpy night after another, until November 3, 2010. Holy cow! Counting the days. (hat tip Political Wire)

The complete 2010 calendar, so we all can participate in one way or another. All elections are critical, and we can all make a difference. Schedule your vacations around them, as we have painfully learned -- elections have consequences:

Sunday, June 27, 2010

There is still a chance to stop this Financial Reform debacle, and Liberty Central has uncovered the final text of this bill along with a FAX CONGRESS Take Action program. You can use their program, or send their sample fax to the House and Senate on you own. The Senate phone and fax numbers are here on page 1, page 2, and page 3; House phone and fax page 1, page 2, and page 3.

The compromise bill now goes to the House and Senate for approval, and on its way to the Obama Triple Crown. There will be a lot of distractions out there in an attempt to keep your eye off the ball: Kagan hearings, Petraeus hearings, House and Senate vote on the final Financial Reform bill, the Gulf oil disaster, and anything else Mr. Obama can drum up.

Liberty Central (Ginny Thomas) is doing a fantastic job on reporting the truth about this bill, which again, does not apprear to have been read by the representatives voting on it. And that's a disgrace, and unacceptable.

In a perfect world, bi-partisanship is a nice idea, but when a government continues to take more and more control, it’s time to stand up and say enough!

All Republicans (including Brown, Snowe, Collins & Grassley) should be appalled at this supposed “Reform” bill.

1. No regulation for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
2. “Too Big to Fail”, more bailouts (ENOUGH!)
3. Treasury Department’s power to seize private property
4. A open line of credit from government to its chosen bank without congressional approval
5. Loss of privacy with a euphemistic Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection

My question to our elected officials is: “Why are you not protecting us from this? Why?”

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The Tea Party movement is a wonderful thing, and may be the backbone that saves this country. It is truly grassroots, full of people who, like myself, have never been an activist in their entire life, and are dedicated in preserving the founding documents and the principles of the Founding Fathers. What liberals have been trying to do to destroy them for the last 100 years, Obama has done in 18 months! The Supreme Court is next, and once that task has been accomplished, he will have supreme power. They don't call it the Supreme Court for nothing.

The one way dictators take power is by an uninvolved public, which is why the Tea Party movement is a wonderful thing. The silent majority is alive and well, and better be on its toes. We have a critical election coming up in 4 short months, thank God, but a lot can happen between now and then. Before Obama loses his malevolent power, he will be 'focused like a laser' to pass his government takeover agenda by hook or by crook, more likely the latter, for this man knows no bounds.

From Investor's Business Daily, Thomas Sowell has written another brilliant piece about our slippery slope to serfdom. The latest Obama assault on our constitutional government is the shake down of BP, and confiscating personal property without the legislative process. Let us not become "Useful Idiots", as Lenin said. Let us look, listen, and learn:

Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?by Thomas Sowell, June 21, 2010

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.

Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.

"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive.

In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.

The president's poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Many among the public and in the media may think that the issue is simply whether BP's oil spill has damaged many people, who ought to be compensated.

But our government is supposed to be "a government of laws and not of men."

If our laws and our institutions determine that BP ought to pay $20 billion — or $50 billion or $100 billion — then so be it.

But the Constitution says that private property is not to be confiscated by the government without "due process of law."

Technically, it has not been confiscated by Barack Obama, but that is a distinction without a difference.

With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.

If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don't believe in constitutional government.

And, without constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a "crisis" — which, as the president's chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed to "go to waste" as an opportunity to expand the government's power.

That power will of course not be confined to BP or to the particular period of crisis that gave rise to the use of that power, much less to the particular issues.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt arbitrarily took the United States off the gold standard, he cited a law passed during the First World War to prevent trading with the country's wartime enemies. But there was no war when FDR ended the gold standard's restrictions on the printing of money.

At about the same time, during the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law "for the relief of the German people."

That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things going far beyond the relief of the German people — indeed, powers that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and on others.

If the agreement with BP was an isolated event, perhaps we might hope that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing isolated about it.

The man appointed by President Obama to dispense BP's money as the administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is only the latest in a long line of presidentially appointed "czars" controlling different parts of the economy, without even having to be confirmed by the Senate, as Cabinet members are.

Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power — vs. the rule of law and the preservation of freedom — are the "useful idiots" of our time. But useful to whom?

Monday, June 21, 2010

This short video is a compilation of questions about Barack Hussein Obama. It makes you wonder about the man in the Oval Office, the actions he has taken from his first day in office, why he continues to hide documentation openly provided by every president before him and the millions spent to do this, and how much damage he will do before his term is up.

Friday, June 18, 2010

When you put yourself so far above everyone else, it's difficult to reach the people. Nothing makes this more evident than the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Obama proclaimed that he is the one who will make the oceans recede and the planet heal, so how can he possibly worry about the little people, now out of work in hundreds and hundreds of fields because of the oil spill and his moratorium on drilling?

When was the last time the president came out and talked to the little people in a true-to-life question and answer arena? Since Joe the plumber, it is apparent Mr. Obama needs staged and scripted environments in order to maintain the cover-up of the real Barack Hussein Obama, and that's why he's an alien in the White House.

As uncomfortable as they may be, our presidents have not made it a habit to hide from confrontation. Mr. Obama just preaches. He has to hide from confrontation, or his true self comes out. He is a man who has completely hidden his past, and rightly so. Unless we are no longer a center-right country, Americans do not want a president who wants to intentionally bankrupt utility companies, or 'transform' the constitution, or form a private militia more powerful than our military, and so forth.

Dorothy Rabinowitz writes an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal about the distance between the president and the American people. And as Ms Rabinowitz writes, "has nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe", but his lack of presidential material.

The Alien in the White HouseThe distance between the president and the people is beginning to be revealedby Dorothy Rabinowitz, June 9, 2010

The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.

There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.

Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.

Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.

Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America's attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.

Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of "Allahu Akbar!"), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. "People have different reasons" he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn't want "to say anything negative about any religion."

And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama's chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: "Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear."

He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan's pronouncements in that speech: That "violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces."

Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: "Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square." Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.

Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal "man-caused disasters'' among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration.

It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.

It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.

It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.

So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.

It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.

Setting Obama's inexperience and ineptitude aside, his most disturbing attribute is his arrogance. Not very presidential, and certainly not endearing, as so many of our historic presidents have been. Arrogance gets in the way, blinds you, and will trip you up every time. This is why Obama cannot see the cure to fix this disaster, and will not call in experts to help -- because he can do it all.

A team of experts would have been able to act as a counter to BP, and might have been able to reveal the true daily spillage from the start; lift the Jones Act to allow ships to help the clean-up; hire the out-of-work fisherman and their boats to help with the clean-up while earning much needed income; accept worldwide offers to assist, especially from those who have dealt with these disasters before; free up restrictions stalling further attempts at clean-up.

What could Obama do? That's a start, and there's lots more, but that ole ego just keeps tripping him up. Oh, did I mention -- the evil twin of arrogant is diabolic, and using this disaster to further another Obama takeover called Cap and Trade is diabolical.

You have the 'never let a crisis go to waste' philosophy, rather than the 'crisis management' philosophy, as Rudy Giuliani said in a recent interview. Now there was a leader. During the 9-11 crisis, no vacation, no time off, and no rounds of golf.

When it comes to the use of the English language, speaking and writing, no one does it better than Charles Krauthammer (save WSJ's Dorothy Rabinowitz, but that's another piece). From Real Clear Politics, Mr. Krauthammer writes on Obama and his diabolical scheme to ram Cap and Trade down our throats. Sound familiar?

Barack Obama doesn't do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill.

He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian "I feel your pain," a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting.

It wasn't until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy.

And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around.

With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

But is this not what we've been trying to do for decades with ethanol, which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot?

As with yesterday's panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions.

Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean energy industry.

That's because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry.

There's a reason petroleum is such a durable fuel. It's not, as Obama fatuously suggested, because of oil company lobbying but because it is very portable, energy dense and easy to use.

But this doesn't stop Obama from thinking that he can mandate into being a superior substitute. His argument: Well, if we can put a man on the moon, why not this?

Aside from the irony that this most tiresome of cliches comes from a president who is canceling our program to return to the moon, it is utterly meaningless.

The wars on cancer and on poverty have been similarly sold. They remain unwon. Why? Because we knew how to land on the moon. We had the physics to do it.

Cancer cells, on the other hand, are far more complex than the Newtonian equations that govern a moon landing. Equally daunting are the laws of social interaction — even assuming there are any — that sustain a culture of poverty.

Similarly, we don't know how to make renewables that match the efficiency of fossil fuels. In the interim, it is Obama and his Democratic allies who, as they dream of such scientific leaps, are unwilling to use existing technologies to reduce our dependence on foreign (i.e., imported) and risky (i.e., deep-water) sources of oil — twin dependencies that Obama decried in Tuesday's speech.

"Part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean," said Obama, is "because we're running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water."

Running out of places on land? What about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the less-known National Petroleum Reserve — 23 million acres of Alaska's North Slope, near the existing pipeline and designated nearly a century ago for petroleum development — that have been shut down by the federal government?

Running out of shallow water sources? How about the Pacific Ocean, a not inconsiderable body of water, and its vast U.S. coastline? That's been off-limits to new drilling for three decades.

We haven't run out of safer and more easily accessible sources of oil. We've been run off them by environmentalists. They prefer to dream green instead.

Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future "even if we're unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don't yet precisely know how we're going to get there."

Here's the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions and put government in control of the energy economy — and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which.

That's why Tuesday's speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality.

The Gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations.

That passes for vision, and vision is Obama's thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Managing to survive the repercussions of the Jimmy Carter administration has left me with apprehensions about the future of our country. The signs are similar, but worse. As Gerald Celente of Trends Reseasrch Institute says: We have ....

Debt piled on top of a failed bailouts, stimulus, tarp, cash for clunkers, housing tax credits, 5.5 trillion dollars dumped into the system to pump it up after the crash in Mar-2009, printing phantom money out of thin air, backed by nothing and producing nothing.

In the great depression, we had trade surplus, we didn't have 14 trillion in debt, we had balanced trade, we had manufacturing capacity. Back then we re-built the world -- during the war and after the war.

You can't spend you way out of problems, you have to produce your way out of problems... We're going into the greatest depression. It's going to be worse that the '29 depression.

Back [in the 1930s] most people didn't own homes, there was not such thing as a home equity loan, people didn't have credit cards, we weren't 14 trillion dollars in debt, we had trade surpluses, we had balanced budgets, we had budget surpluses, not 10.5 trillion dollars in the hole, we had a manufacturing base to produce our way out of this.

Show me one program that [the government] can say "look at the great job that we did". Oh, Katrina - great. Oh, look at the World Trade Center, how they rebuilt it bigger and better than before.

There's not one thing the government can do to solve this problem. They don't have the intelligence and they don't have the methodology.

Stunning. It's a whole different kettle of fish today. We are seriously over-extended, in debt, with no end in sight, and a dangerous man in the Oval Office, drunk with power, on one big helluva spending spree. And, there doesn't seem to be anyone in congress with the backbone to stand up to this despot.

Tax Hikes and the 2011 Economic CollapseToday's corporate profits reflect an income shift into 2010. These profits will tumble next year, preceded most likely by the stock market.by Arthur Laffer, June 6, 2010

People can change the volume, the location and the composition of their income, and they can do so in response to changes in government policies.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the nine states without an income tax are growing far faster and attracting more people than are the nine states with the highest income tax rates. People and businesses change the location of income based on incentives.

Likewise, who is gobsmacked when they are told that the two wealthiest Americans—Bill Gates and Warren Buffett—hold the bulk of their wealth in the nontaxed form of unrealized capital gains? The composition of wealth also responds to incentives. And it's also simple enough for most people to understand that if the government taxes people who work and pays people not to work, fewer people will work. Incentives matter.

People can also change the timing of when they earn and receive their income in response to government policies. According to a 2004 U.S. Treasury report, "high income taxpayers accelerated the receipt of wages and year-end bonuses from 1993 to 1992—over $15 billion—in order to avoid the effects of the anticipated increase in the top rate from 31% to 39.6%. At the end of 1993, taxpayers shifted wages and bonuses yet again to avoid the increase in Medicare taxes that went into effect beginning 1994."

Just remember what happened to auto sales when the cash for clunkers program ended. Or how about new housing sales when the $8,000 tax credit ended? It isn't rocket surgery, as the Ivy League professor said.

On or about Jan. 1, 2011, federal, state and local tax rates are scheduled to rise quite sharply. President George W. Bush's tax cuts expire on that date, meaning that the highest federal personal income tax rate will go 39.6% from 35%, the highest federal dividend tax rate pops up to 39.6% from 15%, the capital gains tax rate to 20% from 15%, and the estate tax rate to 55% from zero. Lots and lots of other changes will also occur as a result of the sunset provision in the Bush tax cuts.

Tax rates have been and will be raised on income earned from off-shore investments. Payroll taxes are already scheduled to rise in 2013 and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will be digging deeper and deeper into middle-income taxpayers. And there's always the celebrated tax increase on Cadillac health care plans. State and local tax rates are also going up in 2011 as they did in 2010. Tax rate increases next year are everywhere.

Now, if people know tax rates will be higher next year than they are this year, what will those people do this year? They will shift production and income out of next year into this year to the extent possible. As a result, income this year has already been inflated above where it otherwise should be and next year, 2011, income will be lower than it otherwise should be.

Also, the prospect of rising prices, higher interest rates and more regulations next year will further entice demand and supply to be shifted from 2011 into 2010. In my view, this shift of income and demand is a major reason that the economy in 2010 has appeared as strong as it has. When we pass the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 2011, my best guess is that the train goes off the tracks and we get our worst nightmare of a severe "double dip" recession.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan—with bipartisan support—began the first phase in a series of tax cuts passed under the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), whereby the bulk of the tax cuts didn't take effect until Jan. 1, 1983. Reagan's delayed tax cuts were the mirror image of President Barack Obama's delayed tax rate increases. For 1981 and 1982 people deferred so much economic activity that real GDP was basically flat (i.e., no growth), and the unemployment rate rose to well over 10%.

But at the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 1983 the economy took off like a rocket, with average real growth reaching 7.5% in 1983 and 5.5% in 1984. It has always amazed me how tax cuts don't work until they take effect. Mr. Obama's experience with deferred tax rate increases will be the reverse. The economy will collapse in 2011.

Consider corporate profits as a share of GDP. Today, corporate profits as a share of GDP are way too high given the state of the U.S. economy. These high profits reflect the shift in income into 2010 from 2011. These profits will tumble in 2011, preceded most likely by the stock market.

In 2010, without any prepayment penalties, people can cash in their Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), Keough deferred income accounts and 401(k) deferred income accounts. After paying their taxes, these deferred income accounts can be rolled into Roth IRAs that provide after-tax income to their owners into the future. Given what's going to happen to tax rates, this conversion seems like a no-brainer.

The result will be a crash in tax receipts once the surge is past. If you thought deficits and unemployment have been bad lately, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The more time we have to truly examine the Health Care Reform Bill, the worse it gets, which is why so many Americans were up in arms about it. Just as in Obama's election, we knew the truth, but the lies were well hidden. The hope is this bill can be repealed, but the truth needs to be exposed on its dangers.

For decades universal healthcare has been a dream of liberals, and now they have it. There is so much about this government takeover of our health system that is wrong, and as Ronald Reagan warned us,

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it.

The Heritage Foundation writes more exposing data on the Health Care Reform Bill, and it only shows to go ya how many lies we were told. This information will be critical in order to keep up the pressure, because if we don't do it now, government run health care will run our lives. These exposures are why the repeal effort continues to grow.

Under the guise of liberalism, America is adopting and accepting socialism. Or are we? It's up to the voters come November 2010.

The central challenge is straightforward and stark: The rising costs of health care will put tremendous pressure on the federal budget during the next few decades and beyond.

In CBO’s judgment, the health legislation enacted earlier this year does not substantially diminish that pressure. In fact, CBO estimated that the health legislation will increase the federal budgetary commitment to health care (which CBO defines as the sum of net federal outlays for health programs and tax preferences for health care) by nearly $400 billion during the 2010-2019 period. Looking further ahead, CBO estimated that the legislation would reduce the federal budgetary commitment to health care in the following decade—if the provisions of the legislation remain unchanged throughout that entire period.

And there is ample evidence that the CBO may be underestimating Obamacare's true costs. Ethics and Public Policy Center Fellow James Capretta details:

Omission of the Medicare "Doc Fix." The Obama Administration and leaders in Congress chose to use all of the tax hikes and spending cuts they could find to create another new entitlement instead of paying for a fix for Medicare physician fees (the so-called “doc fix”). Under current law, those fees are set to get cut by 21 percent in June. The Obama Administration wants to undo the cut permanently, but it does not provide any offsetting savings. The result will be a spending increase of between $250 billion and $400 billion over a decade. Passing an unfinanced “doc fix” wipes out all of the supposed savings from the new legislation and greatly adds to the burden on future taxpayers.

The CLASS Act Gimmick. The new health law creates a voluntary long-term care insurance program, called the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act. Those who sign up for it must pay premiums for five years before becoming eligible for benefit payments. Consequently, premiums paid by enrollees build a small surplus—about $70 billion over 10 years according to CBO—which the health law’s proponents claim as deficit reduction. But these premiums will be needed in short order to pay actual claims.

Medicare Cuts. CBO and the Chief Actuary for the Medicare program have both stated that Medicare spending cuts cannot be counted twice—to pay for a new entitlement expansion and to claim that Medicare’s financial outlook has improved. But that is exactly what the proponents of the new legislation do. If the Medicare cuts and tax hikes for the hospital trust fund (about $400 billion over 10 years, according to CBO) are used solely to improve the capacity of the government to pay future Medicare claims, then the health law becomes a massive exercise in deficit spending.

Estimates of Employees Dropped from Job-Based Coverage. The new insurance arrangements in the state-based exchanges will provide massive new subsidies to low- and moderate-wage households. For instance, at 200 percent FPL, the subsidy for a family of four will reach nearly $11,000 in 2014. But CBO estimates that only 3 million Americans will move from job-based insurance into the exchanges to take advantage of the subsidies, even though there are about 130 million Americans under age 65 with incomes between 100 and 400 percent FPL. Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Cameron Smith of the American Action Forum have estimated that as many as 35 million people will be moved out of job-based coverage and into subsidization. If that is the case, the 10-year cost of the coverage expansion provisions would jump by $400 billion more.

According to one recent estimate, Obamacare will add more than $500 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years and $1.5 trillion in the decade following. No wonder support for the repeal of Obamacare continues to grow.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Imagine if this were George W. Bush. The criminally negligent press would be all over him non-stop.

Obama gets a pass? Maybe not, if there is a God. The one thing this man has undeniably shown America in this critical situation is that he is no leader. We have seen bits and bobs of his weakenss in the past, but this time is completely revealing.

He says he's been on this from day one -- You be the judge. The Emporer Has No Clothes ~